Tomorrowland opens tonight. The Mercury's review is here, and here's how it starts:

The great promise of the Space Age—an era Tomorrowland gleefully fetishizes—was a combination of optimism and humanism. The Space Age asserted that science could, and would, solve the world's problems. While there are bits of that philosophy in Tomorrowland, they're hard to find, and harder still to piece into anything coherent. For all its ambition, Brad Bird's adventure film feels like a movie where entire scenes have gone missing, even as others blur by in a jumble of technobabble. By the time Tomorrowland ends, the only thing that's clear is that George Clooney might want to fuck an eight-year-old robot. (Via.)

I didn't enjoy writing a negative review of Tomorrowland. I like Bird's other films a lot—he strikes me as a smart, whole-hearted filmmaker who cares deeply about what he's making. And Tomorrowland, in particular, seemed right up my alley; as was the case most recently with Christopher Nolan's Interstellar and J.J. Abrams' Star Trek, I really like the idea of pop entertainment that looks to the future as a time of opportunity rather than one of doom. (Not that I don't enjoy a good dystopia: I finally played The Last of Us a few weeks ago, and I still can't stop thinking about it.) I wanted to like Tomorrowland. Because to hear Bird talk about Tomorrowland was to hear about a pretty interesting, pretty relevant movie:

“Somewhere along the way, in the past 30 years or so, this optimistic belief that the future was going to be better slowly gave way to the idea that the future was going to be lousy.... And we just wondered, why did that change?” (Via.)

Alas, Tomorrowland's "better" future seems... not that great? Sure, there are jet packs and robots and rocket ships and rayguns and really cool swimming pools, but in order to experience any of that stuff, you have to be invited—and only the best and the brightest are invited. Those of us who aren't geniuses (or "dreamers," as the movie also refers to them, though that word is largely used as a synonym for geniuses) get left behind in crappy old regular reality. All of those advancements and super-cool, super useful technical gizmos in Tomorrowland? People like you and me can't use them. We aren't even supposed to know about them. They're for the better people. (You know that self-satisfied jackass at your bar who says the reason you don't like Ayn Rand is because you don't really understand her? That guy's going to love Tomorrowland.)

Tomorrowland's hollow optimism is even more frustrating when you compare the movie to another sci-fi blockbuster—one that came out just last week. Mad Max: Fury Road is a post-apocalyptic action flick set in a haunted, sun-ravaged wasteland. In Mad Max, humanity already had its shot, and we blew it; Earth is a dusty, damned shithole ruled by warlords who breed and exploit both individuals and armies. If the radiation don't kill you, the warlords will; if the warlords don't kill you, the marauders will; if the marauders don't kill you... well, you'll probably die anyway.

So how come Mad Max's future feels so much less dystopic than the one glimpsed in Tomorrowland?

Probably because Mad Max sticks to the actual ideas—and not just the shiny surface trappings—that buttressed the philosophy of the Space Age. Despite all its grime and blood, Mad Max: Fury Road is actually about optimism and humanism. The movie begins with Max (Tom Hardy) being hunted, beaten, imprisoned, and used as a human blood bag—and it's only through forging an alliance with a similarly threatened woman, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), that he has a chance to survive. The rules of survival are clear: In this world, you need courage, ingenuity, and relationships. Those who don't learn how to have those things are screwed. But so long as you're willing to do the work and take the risks to make life better—both for you and those around you—you have a chance to outlive the monsters chasing you.

Tomorrowland, on the other hand, outright smirks at dystopias, even as it exploits the threat of them for emotional value. Its world is our world, where billboards advertise a movie called ToxiCosmos 3 and the film's high schooler hero, Casey (Britt Robertson), glibly ignores her English teacher (Paul McGillion) when he tries to talk about how 1984 has become reality. The very real problems of overpopulation and war and environmental collapse are trotted out as as vague, generic threats, given all the stakes of a fantastical alien invasion. It all changes—for Casey, at least—when she touches a magical talisman that transports her to the gleaming utopia of Tomorrowland, whose residents don't think too highly of us. As Tomorrowland's villain (Hugh Laurie) informs the audience, humans can't be bothered to fix things like overpopulation and war and environmental collapse because we're lazy, we fear change, and we like dystopias.

This is the best part of Tomorrowland, actually, when Laurie is ranting about how humans are so dull and passive that we somehow have simultaneous epidemics of obesity and starvation, and how we're more interested in playing apocalyptic video games (see above) than we are in changing our destructive behaviors. Here's the thing: He's saying smart stuff! These are good things to think about! But Tomorrowland doesn't actually address these issues—it just brings them up, and then two minutes later it "solves" them by basically saying, "Think positive! And hope that you're smart and cool and pretty enough to be invited to Tomorrowland, where everything is better."

Mad Max: Fury Road is rated R (for a lot of reasons), while Tomorrowland is rated PG (in the finest Disney tradition, its curse words are rare and its violence is cartoony). But if I had kids (I don't, probably for this exact reason), there's no question which film I'd take them to. Tomorrowland feels like it was made for children, and made to inspire rather than frighten them—but the future it promises is cold, with nothing to offer for those who aren't "special" enough. That's a fucked-up philosophy. (Sorry, guy at the bar.) It's dark and selfish and sad. And to be fair, Mad Max, a film made for adults who like watching car chases and explosions, can also feel dark and selfish and sad—but that's not all there is. Mad Max just starts there, and then it offers more. What a movie's rated doesn't matter nearly as much as what a movie says.

Hope that you're one of the special people, Tomorrowland says, because if you are, you'll get a golden ticket to a magical sci-fi Disneyland where you'll be surrounded by other special people, where you can fly around with a jet pack, and where all of your problems simply don't exist.

Look, we've all got problems, Mad Max says, because life is hard and full of pain and we've really fucked up this world. But if we put in the work, and if we put in the time, and if we do it together, we might have a chance, at least, to make this shitty world better.